


Little Songs

by theskywasblue



Category: Lost Souls - Poppy Z Brite
Genre: M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-08
Updated: 2010-07-08
Packaged: 2017-10-10 10:50:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theskywasblue/pseuds/theskywasblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ghost gives up, Steve gives back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Little Songs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dr_zook](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=dr_zook).



There were bits of Ghost’s skin on the road. Steve couldn’t see him, but he knew they were there, tiny, microscopic scrapings, single cellular pearls brushed with droplets of blood, fragments of Ghost that might have contained a thought, a memory, or a dream.

Or, they might have just been bits of dead cells.

Ghost sat in the tall grass in the ditch, the front wheel of his bike bent beyond spinning, his arm a raw mess of scraped skin from his elbow to his palm. He was watching the slow drops of blood fall off the point of his elbow onto the front of his jeans.

“Fuck it Ghost...” Steve snarled, pulling the wrecked tangle of Ghost’s broken shoelace out of the bike chain, “Are you ever going to learn to tie your shoes?”

“Maybe one day.”

Steve shook his head, ignoring Ghost’s smartass comment; it was just wounded bravado anyhow. He was still trying to figure out why it was that he had felt this burning need to go for a drive not thirty minutes after Ghost left the house, why he had chosen this road, why he had looked to the left when he did just enough to see Ghost’s pale head above the tall grass in the ditch. It was probably some kind of weird psychic voodoo. Ghost would say it was just his intuition – but _all_ of Steve’s intuition seemed to revolve around Ghost, and that was just fucking weird.

But, like most things Ghost was involved in, completely unstoppable.

Steve took the bike and levered it into the back seat of the T-bird. It left dirt all over the floor at lay atop the seat like a pile of rainbow-dyed bones.

“Are you coming man?”

“I’ll bleed on the seat.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

The seats of the T-bird held on to the heavy sweetness of whiskey spills, the pepper-smoke of summer night joints, the musk of their road-trip sweat and the sticky residue of Ghost’s passenger-seat dreams. What was a little blood compared to all that?

***

Steve took two bottles of beer out of the fridge and sat on the couch with his guitar, plucking the strings without any thought towards a real tune or rhythm, and trying not to listen to the sound of water running in the bathroom or to think about the sight of blood-pinked water rushing down the drain.

Ghost wandered out eventually, his arm with a stark white bandage taped to it. He sat on the other end of the couch and watched Steve’s fingers move along the strings. It was something he always did, but in that moment it was unnerving. Of course Steve tried not to act like it.

Ghost probably knew anyhow. Ghost had this way of knowing everything and nothing at the same time.

“That’s a good song,” Ghost said finally.

Steve laughed, “It’s not a fucking song, I’m just messing with the strings.”

“It will be, eventually.”

Steve shook his head and picked up his beer, “You’re just content to leave it that way then, huh?”

“Sometimes you just have to leave things alone.”

Yeah, of course. They were always leaving things alone, leaving things behind like they had the year before, pieces of themselves in blood-soaked bedrooms, dried bones in dark hallways, secrets on bare mattresses soaked with beer-sweat and nightmares.

They still had all that mess boxed up inside themselves somewhere. Sometimes Steve still hoped it was something he had imagined while buzzing high on too much pot or bad shrooms. Then he would drive by Ann’s dark house on a Sunday afternoon and remember that things had changed, that people had died back then.

Ghost was the only thing that had stayed the same, and Steve couldn’t really be blamed if he wanted it to always be that way, could he? But it wasn’t. Everything since New Orleans had been too different even when it _was_ the same.

“It would be a hell of a lot easier if it was anyone but you, you know that?”

Ghost looked at Steve through the gauzy veil of his bangs and said, “I know,” as simple as that. No protests, no apologies, just simple fact. Steve had at least expected him to try and come up with some kind way to fix it, so they wouldn’t always be bumping against each other, like birds that couldn’t see the windowpane.

Steve chewed the inside of his lip, “Dammit Ghost...”

“If I said I’m sorry, could we try again?”

Steve’s heart did something in his chest that he was pretty sure wasn’t natural. “Try what?”

“Whatever you want Steve...it’s fine.”

Except this time, in Ghost-speak, ‘fine’ meant _“I’m willing to give up something I really want because I’d rather keep you happy,”_ and that wasn’t fair. Steve put his guitar down.

“You don’t always have to be a fucking martyr Ghost,” he reached out and grabbed Ghost’s wrist, fingers careful against the bandage, pulled him across the empty space on the couch and kissed him. He tasted of molasses and the wine he had been drinking that afternoon, earthy and sweet, his tongue cautious and soft against Steve’s own. It was slow and easy, the way Steve had always imagined kissing Ghost would be – not that he would ever have admitted to that. They didn’t pull apart afterward, just sat with their foreheads touching, Ghost’s hand on Steve’s thigh, Steve’s hand at the small of Ghost’s back.

Against the subtle raised bumps of Ghost’s spine, Steve’s fingers tapped a careful rhythm, as if they were the frets of a guitar and he was playing a song that only Ghost would probably ever hear.

-End-


End file.
